The first modern people evolved about two million years ago. At this time, there may have been only about 2000 people in all of Africa (or anywhere in the world). These people lived by gathering wild plants, shellfish and eggs, and by scavenging meat that other, stronger animals had killed.

Stone tools, fire, and cooking

About 1.9 million years ago, people started using stone tools, and about 800,000 years ago they began to use fire. Cooking their food on the fire to make it easier to digest may be what gave early people the extra energy to grow bigger brains and become modern people.

But as people got bigger brains, they couldn’t be born with big enough heads, so they had to be born more and more helpless – and then their parents needed bigger and bigger brains to be able to take care of the babies. Some time before 200,000 years ago, people probably started talking. These first modern people probably started out in east Africa.

Fishing and shellfish – the first beads

By this time, the Khoisan people in South Africa were isolated from other people. People living in Blombos Cave, on the seaside in South Africa, were gatheringshellfish to eat. They may have been making bone fish-hooks to catch fish too.

Fishing encouraged modern people to move along the coasts, following the fish, so people began to spread out all along the coast of Africa and even begin to leave Africa, following the coast. By about 75,000 years ago, people in Blombos Cave were mixing minerals to make paint and carving abstract designs into blocks of red ochre. They made seashells into beads for necklaces.

Early African history: The Arabian Peninsula from Eretria, across the Bab el-Mandeb Strait of the Red Sea

People leave Africa

Probably the first modern people to leave Africa – taking their red ochre and seashell necklaces with them – first went through Egypt, around the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula.

Some people may have crossed the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula from Eretria, where you can see Arabia across the water. Still most people lived in Africa. Other people went north up the Persian Gulf into West Asia, following the fish.

Early farming in Africa – millet and donkeys

Starting around 8500 BC, people in Africa began to claim land and start farming. Groups of people were fighting and killing each other in what’s now Kenya by 8000 BC. People in Sudan domesticated millet and sorghum and donkeys.

The first kingdoms in Egypt and Sudan

Farming forced people to have a lot more kids, and by 3000 BC, there were so many people in Africa that they started to form into kingdoms. The first African kingdom (and probably the first big kingdom anywhere) was in Egypt, where the Pharaohs built the pyramids. South of Egypt, along the upper Nile river, was the kingdom of Kush (modern Sudan).

Phoenicians and Carthage in North Africa

Slowly, as more places got involved in farming and trade, other parts of Africa also began to form kingdoms. About 700 BC, the Phoenicians conquered part of North Africa and founded the city of Carthage.

When the Persians conquered the Phoenicians in 539 BC, Carthage became an independent kingdom that ruled most of the Western Mediterranean.

Early African history: Palace at Kerma (Sudan, 1750 BC)

Bantu migration from West Africa

Less than 200 years later, about 300 BC, the Bantu people, who lived along the Niger river in West Africa, began to form kingdoms too, and then to migrate south, taking over other people’s land or just joining them on their land.

About the same time, the Romans conquered North Africa, and then Egypt. When Roman North Africa converted to Christianity in the 300s AD, soon afterwards many Axumites in Sudan and Ethiopia converted too. At the same time, the Bantu kept moving southeast, and they started farming and herding cattle and sheep. By the 400s AD, the Bantu had taken over some of the East Coast of Africa and some of the grasslands in southern Africa.

Did you find out what you wanted to know about early African history? Let us know in the comments!

Fake? Sorry, no, evolution is how one creature turns into another. It’s how your kids have blue eyes if you have blue eyes, and brown eyes if you have brown eyes. It’s how bugs develop resistance to pesticides. It’s not subject to debate.

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